Aram Zucker-Scharff

NBC censors Constantine’s cigarettes, but is fine with scenes of murder & demonic possession.:

The original Hellblazer comics were aimed squarely at an adult audience, and were chock full of sex, violence, and adult storylines. But oddly enough, the one thing that’s been forbidden from the TV adaptation is… smoking.

“You can’t smoke on network,” Constantine director Neil Marshall told Collider this weekend. “That’s one of his character traits.  We’re working around that.  We’re trying to get aspects of it in there as much as possible.  We’ll see.”

Smoking isn’t just an iconic aspect of John Constantine’s character, it also has a significant effect on his life story. After discovering that he has terminal lung cancer while he’s still in his 30s, he sells his soul to two rival lords of Hell. This resulted in them curing his illness, because his death would lead to them having to start a war over his soul. Constantine’s smoking was also a major part of the Keanu Reeves movie, which portrayed the habit in a similarly negative light. 

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Constantine is a character grounded in a tradition of British horror and the weird and unabashedly post-code era of comics.

Most mainstream comic fans only know of John Constantine from his brief appearance in the first book of Gaiman’s Sandman (and perhaps from his recent adaption by the mainstream DC universe); but he’s an old character, his first appearance was in 1985. Though his modern media incarnations (notably the mostly terrible film) tend to focus on Christian mysticism, he dealt with cults, world dragons, and mysticism from all over the globe before angels ever become chic. Though it seems unlikely, I hope that the new TV show will look towards the more global tradition, instead of the relatively narrow path of traditional Christian ghost stories.